The present invention relates to an image recognition apparatus, an image recognition processing method and an image recognition program for discriminatively recognizing and identifying any individual person or public corporation from an object image thereof obtained by shooting a person or a logo mark put up in a store or the like.
The technology of face recognition to identify an individual person by discriminatively recognizing his or her face shot by a camera is adopted in a field of security to identify or authenticate an individual person, and it is also utilized in a human interface of a pet robot having an appearance and shape modeled on some animal such as a dog for example.
However, in the known face recognition technology described above, there arises a problem that, if the number of samples of reference images registered previously in databases for storage and management of the registered face image data becomes great, some erroneous recognition is liable to occur due to the resultant increase of similar faces to consequently bring about deterioration of the recognition rate.